hence!"

He puffed his pipe, but Hale said nothing.

"Yes, sir," he added cheerily, "we're in for a hell of a merry time NOW.
The mountaineer hates as long as he remembers and--he never forgets."

XV

Hand in hand, Hale and June followed the footsteps of spring from the
time June met him at the school-house gate for their first walk into the
woods. Hale pointed to some boys playing marbles.

"That's the first sign," he said, and with quick understanding June
smiled.

The birdlike piping of hylas came from a marshy strip of woodland that
ran through the centre of the town and a toad was croaking at the foot
of Imboden Hill.

"And they come next."

They crossed the swinging foot-bridge, which was a miracle to June,
and took the foot-path along the clear stream of South Fork, under the
laurel which June called "ivy," and the rhododendron which was "laurel"
in her speech, and Hale pointed out catkins greening on alders in one
swampy place and willows just blushing into life along the banks of a
little creek. A few yards aside from the path he found, under a patch
of snow and dead leaves, the pink-and-white blossoms and the waxy green
leaves of the trailing arbutus, that fragrant harbinger of the old
Mother's awakening, and June breathed in from it the very breath of
spring. Near by were turkey peas, which she had hunted and eaten many
times.

"You can't put that arbutus in a garden," said Hale, "it's as wild as a
hawk."

Presently he had the little girl listen to a pewee twittering in a
thorn-bush and the lusty call of a robin from an apple-tree. A bluebird
flew over-head with a merry chirp--its wistful note of autumn long since
forgotten. These were the first birds and flowers, he said, and June,
knowing them only by sight, must know the name of each and the reason
for that name. So that Hale found himself walking the woods with an
interrogation point, and that he might not be confounded he had, later,
to dip up much forgotten lore. For every walk became a lesson in botany
for June, such a passion did she betray at once for flowers, and he
rarely had to tell her the same thing twice, since her memory was like a
vise--for everything, as he learned in time.

Her eyes were quicker than his, too, and now she pointed to a snowy
blossom with a deeply lobed leaf.

"Whut's that?"

"Bloodroot," said Hale, and he scratched the stem and forth issued
scarlet drops. "The Indians used to put it on their faces a